By stufflovely
Fendi bodysuit. Agmes earring. Makeup colors: Eyeliner Effet Faux Cils Shocking in Deep Black and Rouge Pur Couture Lipstick in Corail Legende by Yves Saint Laurent. Essie nail polish in Not Red-y for Bed.
My Revlon deal was the perfect confluence of events. Former model Bethann Hardison, who was working from the inside of fashion in order to make a change, was my agent. I had wonderful people, like the stylist Elizabeth Saltzman, who believed in me and actually introduced me to Revlon. And if you want to keep connecting the dots, then you had a Black cosmetic chemist, Jerri Baccus-Glover, who was developing Color Style, a line specifically formulated for Black women, at Revlon and was given agency to bring it to fruition and to the market. I was walking all these shows — designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Isaac Mizrahi, and Azzedine Alaïa — and editors like André Leon Talley and Linda Wells, who launched Allure, supported me. I knew that it could be possible that this contract would happen.
When the contract [with Revlon] finally came through, I had such a sense of relief that women could go to their corner drugstore in little towns and big cities and get cosmetics at an accessible price point that matched their needs. Even to this day, I have people come up to me and say that because of my Revlon ads they were able to go to the drugstore in their town and tell the owners, “This line exists. Order it for us.”